Exotic locales add atmosphere to complex plots

I've spent a great deal of time in the past two weeks in bookstores across the United Kingdom. In an Edinburgh bookstore, I picked up Peter May's "The Black-house" (SilverOak, $24.95), the first in a trilogy set on the Isle of Lewis, "a brooding landscape" on the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. As I flipped through its pages an elderly man standing near me said, "That's better than butter." I bought it immediately.

Comment

By Carole E. Barrowman

MailTribune.com

By Carole E. Barrowman

Posted Apr. 21, 2013 at 2:00 AM

By Carole E. Barrowman
Posted Apr. 21, 2013 at 2:00 AM

» Social News

I've spent a great deal of time in the past two weeks in bookstores across the United Kingdom. In an Edinburgh bookstore, I picked up Peter May's "The Black-house" (SilverOak, $24.95), the first in a trilogy set on the Isle of Lewis, "a brooding landscape" on the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. As I flipped through its pages an elderly man standing near me said, "That's better than butter." I bought it immediately.

Edinburgh detective Fin Macleod is engulfed in grief over the death of his son, but for his superior enough is enough so he forces Fin to Lewis, Fin's homeland, to investigate a murder on the island with brutal similarities to an unsolved killing in Scotland's capital.

May cuts between two distinct narratives in this stylish noir: the murder investigation told in third person and Fin's first-person account of growing up on Lewis. Initially, Fin finds everything about his homecoming "almost unbearably depressing," including the "stoic sheep standing firm against the Atlantic gales."

Much like the erosion of the island's "fertile sandy soil" (known as machair), the foundation Fin has "shored against his ruins" crumbles at his feet as he pursues the investigation.

Despite my own Scottish upbringing, the Isle of Lewis with its peat bogs and its thatched "blackhouses" is a foreign land, a place "still in the grips of a joyless religion," tied to ancient traditions (like the "guga harvest" or gannet hunt), a place tethered to the sea in ancient and archaic ways. May's descriptions of the harsh beauty of Lewis seduced me and I was thoroughly smitten with Fin.

Ireland may be miles south of Lewis, but May's use of setting to shape character makes his book and Erin Hart's fascinating "The Book of Killowen" (Scribner, $26) close neighbors.

A year has passed since American pathologist Nora Gavin "brought her sister's killer to justice," and 12 months since she began sharing Irish archaeo-logist Cormac Maguire's bed, and together, they've been adjusting their domestic life to Cormac's father Joseph's aphasia (result of a stroke). Nora and Cormac are asked to join "the recovery team" for an ancient bog man discovered with the body of a Dublin TV host submerged in a Tipperary swamp. Nora and Cormac lodge with a community of artists at Killowen farm, each one becoming a suspect in the TV personality's murder.

The deeper Nora and Cormac dig into the peat, the more they find themselves "unraveling connections between the living and the dead" (you wouldn't be remiss in hearing James Joyce in that phrase). The nature of language and love — its "garbled code," its vocal tics and its illumination in books and art winds through Hart's plot in intriguing and surprising ways.

Finally, two of my favorite newish writers, Hilary Davidson and Tricia Fields, also have mysteries out this month, and although both are set firmly in the Americas (west Texas and Mexico), they're as evocative in their settings and as engaging in their plots as my first picks. In Davidson's "Evil in All Its Disguises" (Forge, $25.99), Lily Moore, a travel journalist, takes a junket to Acapulco where a friend asks for her help with an expose, one that may or may not be motivated by payback rather than journalistic principles. When her friend goes missing, Lily investigates, discovering the Acapulco of the brochures is miles from the dangerous reality she faces. Davidson's book pulses with psychological suspense, especially as Lily's delightful holiday becomes a dangerous stay.

Fields' captivating "Scratchgravel Road" (Minotaur, $24.99) is the second in her series featuring Artemis, Texas, Police Chief Josie Gray. One morning Josie finds a young woman unconscious from heat stroke lying near the body of a Mexican immigrant with unusual wounds on his arms and a bizarre deterioration of his internal organs. Is he the victim of the drug wars raging in this part of the desert, or of something more sinister in a nearby "Feed Plant"?

Fields deftly balances the intriguing intimate relationships among her characters with the broader themes of industrial corruption and greed. With her wild desert settings and her thrilling plot, Fields' novel is situated somewhere between Western terrain and mystery territory.

Carole E. Barrowman is a professor of English at Alverno College and co-author of the novel "Hollow Earth."